ONTARIO Agricultural CONFERENCE – From Good to Great!

Sep 15, 2023

The ONTARIO Agricultural CONFERENCE is excited to bring you to the next level with our 2024 conference (#OAgC24). Using the excellent feedback from attendees over the past years, the conference is expanding to offer even more opportunities for in-person learning, while maintaining the excellent access to sessions with our virtual format as well.

The 2024 conference will offer attendees the opportunity to join the conference In-Person at 3 separate locations on 3 different dates in January! Ridgetown, Waterloo and Kemptville will all offer In-Person options, while those choosing the virtual conference will be able to access sessions from their home computer and mobile devices, anywhere they happen to be. Of course, In-Person attendees at any location will have access to all virtual sessions as well, right up to March 31, 2024.

January 3, 2024, the Virtual Kickoff gets the conference underway. All participants are invited to participate virtually, with 4 key sessions streamed to viewers, as well as many ON DEMAND sessions available that day.

January 4 & 5, 2024, the Southwestern Agricultural Conference in Ridgetown offers the first In-Person opportunity. There will be four consecutive sessions every hour offering attendees a much greater selection than the 2023 conference. New this year is a special 2-hour combine clinic offered twice each day.

Returning, of course, is the ever popular “Taste of Ontario” Social on January 4, and our traditional trade show with the latest in crop production technology.

January 16, 2024, the Eastern Ontario Crop Conference hosts the second In-Person day of the conference in Kemptville, with 2 exciting concurrent sessions every hour, a trade show for great discussions and more!

January 19, 2024, the Midwestern Agricultural Conference wraps up the In-Person days in Waterloo, with a deep dive into Managing Soils, one of the most critical components of farming. Of course, there will be a trade show, and lots of excellent discussion.

Sessions from all 3 In-Person events will be recorded and included as ON DEMAND sessions as they become available, to allow all conference attendees access to the incredible information that will be delivered. All recorded sessions will be available virtually until March 31, 2024.

As well, back by popular demand, TEC Talk Tuesdays will allow participants to join the discussion as conference speakers dig into selected topics in more detail on Tuesday evenings through January and February, 7:27 pm sharp.

Check our website www.ontarioagconference.ca or follow us on twitter @OAgC24 and stay tuned for more details on what promises to be our best conference ever!!

Mark your calendars! Registration opens November 1, and In-Person capacity is limited, so early registration for these events is essential.

Source : UO Guleph

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids